Over the past two decades, digital video compression technologies have been developed and standardized to enable efficient digital video communication, distribution and consumption. Most of the commercially widely deployed standards are developed by ISO/IEC and ITU-T, such as MPEG-2 and H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10). Due to the emergence and maturity of video compression technologies, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) may be developed.
Compared to traditional digital video services over satellite, cable, and terrestrial transmission channels, more and more video applications, such as but not limited to, video chat, mobile video, and streaming video, may be employed in an environment that may be heterogeneous on the client as well as the network side. Smart phones, tablets, and TV may dominate the client side, where the video may be transmitted across the Internet, the mobile network, and/or a combination of both. To improve the user experience and video quality of service, scalable video coding (SVC) may be implemented. In SVC, the signal may be encoded once at highest resolution, but enable decoding from subsets of the streams depending on the specific rate and resolution desired by the application and supported by the client device. The international video standards MPEG-2 Video, H.263, MPEG4 Visual and H.264 may have tools and/or profiles to support scalability modes.